Uncovering Your Target Market Using Facebook

The majority of people and companies who are presently involved in Internet Marketing can appreciate the power of Facebook, but it’s important to think about the value that it can provide for your business apart from the popular social media aspects – consider advertising.

Facebook certainly has the reach when it comes to user frequency and time spent in one place, there’s clearly a reason Facebook has 600 million users, but the catch for businesses is that they don’t care much for ads. If we consider the typical Facebook user we’ll find that they’re much more interested in what their friends are doing, browsing photos, searching for people they know or want to know, and of course playing social based games. Uno, anyone?

Facebook knows what the user wants. In order to maintain the traditional Facebook experience they’ve chosen to keep advertisements unobtrusive in the sidebar rather than presenting them directly to the user. From a business perspective this is very important to keep in mind, and it essentially boils down to two things: Facebook won’t drive tons of traffic to your business and CTR percentages will be very low (often below 1%).

So what’s the value, right?

Demographic Relevancy

Anyone familiar with Facebook knows that users fill out their profiles with very detailed information about themselves, including age, sex, marital status, geo-graphical location, books, movies, Places they’ve visited and checked-in at, and fan pages of brands that they ‘like’.

Given the way that Facebook allows advertisers to view the types of people clicking Facebook ads, you can easily use this data to identify trends, possibly uncovering a target market that you may not have approached in the past. If you consider this social aspect from a highly strategic point of view, businesses have the ability to optimize an entire marketing strategy around this data to reach a highly relevant audience. This is clearly great for branding.

Remember, the more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them.